Payton wrote, "When I was rich and could afford it. I went to a psychiatrist . . . He gave me the obvious explanation — I was inwardly afraid of men and their power over me. I didn't argue. It could be. Men have dragged me through all the emotions, top to bottom, and in between . . . I had a lot of electricity in me and men just didn't hit and run with me. They usually came back for seconds and with their tongues wagging."
Plenty of gossip tongues were wagging when older distinguished actor and Group Theatre groupie Franchot Tone spotted Payton at Ciro's on The Strip and became her new boyfriend. High-profile Hollywood romance didn't stop Payton from fooling around with former footballer Woody Strode and dreamy young Guy Madison, however; when Tone found his girlfriend and Madison in bed, Confidential had its first big Barbara Payton headline. Mogul Jack Warner punished Payton by loaning her out to cheapie producer Herman Cohen to star in The Bride of the Gorilla. It was the beginning of the professional end for Barbara, of whom Cohen later said, "She was a whore who got lucky."
Barbara Payton and Tony Wright in Bad Blonde.
In 1963, Payton freely admitted she was a whore (" . . . this kid of twenty-one, he was so awed by me I went to bed with him and then wouldn't take his money. That's how lousy a hooker I was"). But she considered herself a sexual iconoclast ("I was unconventional and a maverick — but people seemed to like it"). One man who clearly appreciated it was strapping B-movie star Tom Neal, whose most famous role is in the bleak, low-budget film noir Detour. Neal and Tone literally, publicly battled it out for Barbara on the cover of Confidential. Tone (one of Joan Crawford's matrimonial cast-offs) was hospitalized with a concussion after the fisticuffs, and Barbara married him. The marriage only lasted seven weeks, and she returned to her fiery relationship with Tom Neal ("Honey, I just took one look at him and I absolutely flipped! He looked so wonderful in his trunks"). He liked to lift weights in his skivvies on their patio while his girlfriend sunbathed nude nearby, in full view of nearby residents.
The two exhibitionists, now Hollywood jokes, ventured to England where Payton appeared in two films, one of them appropriately called Bad Blonde and inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice, and the boxing movie Body and Soul. Back in the United States, the intense, dysfunctional couple toured in a theatrical production of Postman, and on at least one occasion Barbara appeared onstage drunk and passed out.
She and Neal finally called it quits — it was whispered Payton was his punching bag; in the 1960s Neal was convicted of killing his third wife — and Barbara tried to get her Hollywood career back on track.
"Today, I live in a rat-and-roach-infested apartment," wrote Payton. "And I drink too much rosé wine."
But the town had turned its back. Bloated and boozy, she lost the Beverly Hills estate that had been given to her by Tone when he dumped her, and pleaded poverty in court. Payton spent her last few years trying to survive as a five-dollar hooker in sleazy Los Angeles neighborhoods. "Today, right now, I live in a rat-and-roach infested apartment with not a bean to my name and I drink too much rosé wine," Payton wrote. "I don't like what my scale tells me. The little money I do accumulate to pay the rent comes from old residuals, poetry and favors to men . . . Does it all sound depressing to you? Queasy? Well, I'm not ashamed . . . " Desperate, she returned to her parents, by then living in San Diego, but they were also alcoholics. The trio stayed drunk, and Payton died in 1967 at age thirty-nine, of heart and liver failure, hunched over a toilet.
At one time Payton would have been called a nymphomaniac. Today we might call her sexually compulsive. Around the time her life story was published, she was hanging out in dark bars, her once-va-va-voom physique absurdly swollen by booze and teeth missing from heroin use, plotting her return to the top of the cinema game. I Am Not Ashamed was itself part of that pathetic attempt, but she also needed the money. For pouring her heart out, she received $1,000. n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
photo: Austin Young
A writer and performer in theater, film and TV, John Epperson is Lypsinka!, a.k.a. The Official Celebrity of the New Millennium. His award-winning shows include Lypsinka! As I Lay Lip-Synching, the autobiographical piece John Epperson: Show Trash and the play My Deah, a version of Medea set in the New South. See www.lypsinka.com.
photo: Austin Young
